Fixing the Open Sign
The Open Sign, how did a simple design go so wrong? The simple flip-board or sandwich board that lets traffic passing by know that your business is open, has become a blue and red glow in every store ignored by everyone. What business owner dreaming of the constant stream of customers flowing into their business would not grab the eighty-dollar open sign on their way to check out from their local COSTCO? Good karma alone requires you to throw that POS (point of sale) open sign into your cart.
Imagine there is a position you are told over and over that must be filled for you to have a successful business. Imagine as soon as you fill that role, that person is never listened to, often has communication issues, and only works for half the hours they were hired for. Taking that description, you roughly described all the problems with the modern open sign.
Creating a New Open Sign
By itself, the open sign seems like a throwaway artifact of the ubiquitous mom-and-pop shop. However, its sheer ubiquity across commerce in general is what gives the sign its real potential to become a more powerful tool. But first things first, what problems does this pitiful piece of design suffer from? The open sign is a singular example of a simple design intent being expressed in the worst way on every level possible. The design ignores form, color, accessibility, and legibility. Overall it fails in its one job: to consistently and effectively communicate to potential customers when its owner’s service is available to the public.
Color Choices that Make Sense
Color would have to be the most obvious of the problems the average open sign suffers from. We can sort these problems into two buckets. 1. Color as the larger population understands it and 2.As the colorblind and low-vision population perceives color. For the larger population the red “OPEN,” screams “GO AWAY”. So much so, that red is the color of choice for international traffic designers to say “Not Here Folks.”
A deeper dive into color tells us what it means for sufferers of color blindness. The color choices become a bland mess. Giving no other hint of what its message is to a customer.
How do we fix the color choices of the open sign? Suffers of Green-Blind Deuteranopia will tell you green and red combinations do no good for them. However, the red and blue of the open sign seem to still differentiate from one another across multiple types of color blindness. A quick color study of this theory proves that blue and red continue to be powerful even to the color blind.
Blue stays vivid while red and green turn to brown. This takes us back to our traffic signage designer, form must and language must fill in for color. Imagine a non-English speaker or an illiterate person trying do divine what these red characters must be saying. Red symbols on blue are standards for the signage that is meant to discourage entry, so shape and symbolism become true standard bearers of a globally understood open sign.
A Shape to Say Open
When color and language fail, we must turn to form to carry the day. International traffic sign design has known this for years. The current open sign borrows its form from an artifact of 90’s graphic design and adds nothing to its functionality.
From iconography to color forms, designers who work with wayfinding systems constantly work with these nonverbal visual-first methodologies as a fallback for reinforcing the meaning of signage.
What form could a new open sign borrow from to effectively communicate its message to the masses? Stepping back and looking at what global design systems engage the public at a global scale, mass transit sign systems clearly become an option as a metaphor for our new sign to borrow from.
Specifically the no-entry sign and the blue circle and arrow of directional road signage. Of all signs, these two are clearly legible to pedestrians and drivers alike and share a shape. A shared shape could make for a dual-purpose sign that works both open and closed hours.
Exploring the Missing Requirements
So where else does the open sign fail, if we revisit our metaphor of the open sign as an employee; we revisit the idea it only works for half the hours it is needed for. At least the old paper-hung sign could be flipped from open to closed. The cumbersome LED COSTCO special can only simply be turned off (if one remembers to turn it off at the end of the day). To expound on that, it only addresses the community with one message. However, if you are a small business owner you have a much more flexible view of simply being open or closed small business owners can be in and out go to the WC or out for lunch. For a business owner, you want to talk to street traffic in a much more dynamic way:
15 minutes till open
15 minutes till closed
No wait right now
Temporary offers to increase occupancy ($3 pints for the next hour)
BRB 15 minutes
Oh, and Open/Closed of course
Designing a Better Open Sign (finally)
If we combine a few elements discussed above with a smart device to add a new layer of communication(think something like a nest). We start to have a new product that could not only improve the open sign but evolve it to be a tool for improving a community.
How can a sign improve a community though? Often way-finding systems borrow from architecture for guiding principles. Such is the case here, our new open sign will be borrowing from the world of Architecture. Specifically principles of urban infill and architecture:
Principles of Urban Architecture:
Character: Architecture should either protect or enhance the community they are being built.
Continuity & enclosure: Architecture should connect streets and public spaces and deepen a sense of community.
Quality of public realm: Create high-quality public spaces that are attractive, safe, comfortable, well-maintained, welcoming, and accessible to everyone.
Ease of movement: Architecture must work to bring pedestrian traffic to life by not only addressing the needs of its inhabitants but also the pedestrians at a surface level.
Legibility: Create a place that both inhabitants and visitors can understand and easily navigate.
Adaptability: Create architecture that can adapt to change.
Diversity: Create architecture that encourages a mix of uses.
Sustainability: Urban Architecture addresses social, economic, and environmental sustainability for the future.
How can a simple sign do all of these things? Realizing that the sign is an opportunity for business owners to engage street-level traffic. Enhancing the LED open sign with basic Bluetooth and wifi abilities the sign could be imbued with all the tools to turn any strip mall storefront closer toward architecture and a way for businesses to begin to talk to its community.
Character: The round shape and durably made the new open sign allows for it to be attached anywhere. Wifi enabled, it does not have to be in arms reach to operate it, this allows it to become a part of the community. The sign could go so far to be able to be dimmed so that quiet neighborhoods don’t have to have the light pollution of multiple businesses screaming OPEN at the top of their lungs and maintaining the posterity of the neighborhood.
Ease of movement & Legibility: Getting the open sign out of the window and into the built environment allows it to be in a location to speak to a community. From blocks away a business can communicate. Bluetooth-enabled signs could allow for multiple signs on multiple facades to sync up. Simpler, color and shape-based signage allow for all to understand what is happening at any given local.
Diversity: Adding features to the open sign through an accompanying mobile app each business can tailor their sign to their needs. Set their own ours, set a BRB message, temporary messaging the ability to dim the sign based on neighborhood settings.
Adaptability With a smart sign one could have the ability to set a Be Right Back message for an employee bathroom break without a hand-scrawled sign in the window. During slow moments of business, the sign would have the ability to set temporary messages to pull in street traffic until business rebounds. Imagine a sign that tied into an open sign website. A potential customer could see multiple temporary messages for open sign users in the area to help make their shopping and dining decisions.
Sustainability Surely if such a sign were actually made it would have to be environmentally friendly, low energy, ability to brighten and darken throughout the day, and maybe even solar-powered. Hopefully, it could be a device that would even have resale value to keep old signs out of the landfill.
Simple, clean, easy to read around the globe, and creates a dialogue with customers. While the above may not be the right design I believe it is proof that it is something worth improving.
